Discipline keeps you going when your curiosity, motivation, and excitement evaporate.Īt Top Gun, the pilots most likely to be invited back as instructors were the ones with the most discipline. Discipline drives you to do the work you don't enjoy, but is required. And although that discipline often goes unrecognized, it doesn't go unrewarded: It allowed Chris to save countless lives and made him the most successful sniper in SEAL history.ĭiscipline's value transcends the battlefield. The only thing that gets you through an environment like that is discipline. Few things can sap your motivation and focus like Ramadi's suffocating dust and 115 degree heat. Day in and day out, I watched him do the tedious, thankless, and unrewarding work they don't show you in recruitment videos or movies. Most of my time was spent with men like Chris Kyle, who would sit next to me on rooftops, motionless for hours, observing the city through the scope of his rifle. Although my image of Navy SEALs slinging machine guns and clearing buildings was realized through my experience with Task Unit Bruiser, that kind of excitement was relatively rare. When I returned to Iraq in 2006, I traded my F/A-18 Hornet for an M-4 Carbine. Night landings remained an unrewarding, unfulfilling, and constant misery. No amount of motivation, visualization, or familiarization made me comfortable as I descended towards a faint string of lights in a sea of black. My self-discipline was all that I could rely on, and I needed every ounce that I had.Īll told, over the next four years I completed more than 120 nighttime carrier landings, often following combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And it was a job that was going to require me to do things I didn't enjoy or find easy.įear can debilitate a carrier aviator, especially in combat. I realized that the dream job was just that: a job. For the first time in my life, flying wasn't fun.
Literally overnight, my motivation evaporated – as did most of my interest in spending a career flying from a carrier.
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